Thomas J Parlette
“The Law of Holes”
Psalm 130
3/26/23
On August 29th, 1973, Pisces III, a small Canadian deep-sea submersible, sank to the floor of the Irish Sea at a depth of nearly 1600 feet. Two men were inside this capsule; former British Royal navy officer Roger Mallinson and engineer Roger Chapman. When a rear hatch was accidentally opened, sea water rushed in, causing the tiny sub to plummet like a rock to the bottom of the sea.
It took more than three days to rescue the pair, and when they were finally reached, the two men had only 12 minutes of oxygen left – talk about cutting it close! They’d been trapped in the crushing depths of the sea for 84 hours.
Or, consider an even deeper hole – the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It is the most jaw-dropping, radical, human-made hole on the planet, and the deepest artificial point on Earth. This shaft was built by the Soviets during the Cold War and it is 40,230 feet deep. It is so deep that locals call it the “well to hell,” and swear they can hear the screams of souls writhing in hell.(1)
It was at the bottom of such an abyss that the writer of Psalm 130 was writing about, and he or she was just about to lose all hope of ever seeing the light of day.
It’s quite likely that the holes in which we find ourselves are figurative ones, but real, nonetheless. Even in the face of rescue, we instinctively panic, like a drowning victim trying to climb out of the water on top of a lifeguard. We tend to escalate, rather than deescalate, defuse, calm down or lighten up. We are experts at making bad situations worse.
As a recent blogpost acknowledged, there a few sure-fire ways to make a bad situation worse. For instance:
1. Get visibly angry.
2. Raise your voice.
3. Be “Problem Oriented.”
4. Use a lot of “You” statements.
5. Keep saying “Calm Down.”
6. Make sure you get the last word.(2)
All these reactions will make the hole you find yourself in even deeper.
The most pertinent advice for people in situations like this has been attributed to many different people over the years, from Will Rogers to Bill Clinton, from Warren Buffet to Pat Robertson – all of whom knew what they were talking about when they referred to the First Law of Holes, “The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”(3)
That makes sense. Unfortunately, most people only stop digging in order to find a bigger shovel.
The saying can be traced back to October 25th, 1911 – on page 6 of The Washington Post: “Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper.”(4)
We have other idioms similar to this First Law of Holes, such as adding fuel to the fire, pouring gasoline on the fire, adding insult to injury, and so on.
The Second Law of Holes is “Don’t dig a hole for others.” This is a biblical principle derived from Proverbs 26:27, which I admit sounds best in Elizabethan English: “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him.” In other words, “Don’t lay traps for your enemies, because you’re likely to fall in the hole you dug. Consider the biblical story of Ruth. Haman meet his unfortunate end when he died on the very gallows he had built for Mordecai. The writer of Psalm 7 had a similar thought: “Whoever digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit they have made.”
The author of today’s Psalm is in a hole of his own. The psalm begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!” Obviously, the scene is of a person in a pit from which escape seems impossible. From the bottom of this pit, the writer is now hollering for help. “Lord, hear my voice.” So the Third Law of Holes, is to cry for help.
That, too, might seem obvious – but in a culture where independence and “rugged individualism” are seen as virtues, crying out in any way, shape or form just isn’t tolerated. It’s more often seen as a sign of weakness.
Asking for help might be okay if it is the government we’re hitting up. But polite, intelligent, wise people with strong emotional IQ’s do not ask others for help. I can find what I want on my own in Hyvee or the Home Depot, thank you very much. I mean many of us balk at asking for any sort of directions – although GPS has almost wiped out the need to ask for directions at the gas station anymore. God forbid we should think of asking for help.
But the Bible teaches us that it’s okay to ask for help. It’s especially okay to cry out to God for help – in fact, it’s almost required if we hope to dig ourselves OUT of holes instead of INTO them.
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” So begins psalm 130, one of the seven penitential psalms known as De Profundis, and also the psalm famously referenced by Oscar Wilde in his letter while he was serving a prison sentence in Reading Gaol. The psalm-writer, probably a poet languishing in despair during the Babylonian exile, describes his location and situation. He calls it the “depths.” We might say, the “pits.”
We may not know the full extent of the author’s distress, but we can be sure it was considerable. It has the tone of a person who has lost everything in life. It has the sound of a parent who has suddenly lost a child. It feels like the anguish of someone whose life and reputation have been destroyed and who now feels there is nowhere to turn.
This is a person at a crossroads. Maybe you’ve been there – standing alone at an intersection in the middle of nowhere, realizing the choices you are facing have been reduced to two. “I either end it all now and forever – or I cry out of the depths of my despair to God. I die – or I ask for help. There are no other options. “To be, or not to be – that is the question” as Hamlet put it. I hope you’ve never been in such a deep, profound, dark place, but many people have.
That is where this psalm-writer is – in the depths.
What’s worse, he is not only in the pit of despair, but it is a pit of his own making. How often has that happened I our lives? It’s bad enough to be in extremis, worse if it is self-inflicted. The psalmist readily admits the audacity and borderline hypocrisy. He wants help from the very source against whom he has sinned. “If you, O Lord, should mark my iniquities, Lord, who could stand?” He doesn’t identify his mistakes, but if we were to take a candid inventory of our own choices, decisions, behaviors and ill-chosen words that have landed us in hot water, we’d probably not have too much difficulty determining where we went wrong.
Would you like it if God kept track of your sins? Of course not – nobody would. Most of us don’t like it when our spouse or our children keep bringing up our short-comings or past mistakes. How enjoyable would it be if someone were keeping a file filled with your mistakes or wrote you up for bad behavior – not very enjoyable at all.
Yet, even when we’re staring at the ceiling at zer-dark-30 in the morning, while cursing our stubborn, intrangient nature – we know the one thing we need to do. “I need to ask God to save me from myself.” We know that God alone can lift us out of the depths. How do we know this? Because we agree with the Psalmist: “There is forgiveness with you.”
Forgiveness, that most gracious of words. There is a repairing and healing balm in forgiveness. We know this from experience. That’s why it is god-like to offer forgiveness when we have been wronged. C.S Lewis once noted that “to be Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”(5) There is perhaps no greater attribute of God’s essential nature than God’s willingness, even eagerness, to forgive the repentant and brokenhearted. Perhaps that is why Martin Luther called Psalm 130, along with the other penitential psalms, the Pauline Psalms – because of their emphasis on faith and forgiveness.(6) This amazing God is one” who forgives all your iniquities… for… as far as the east is from the west, so far does God remove our transgressions from us,” as Psalm 103 puts it.
Human beings may take longer to forgive than God, and perhaps some will never forgive or forget. But, after exhausting all our options, we have to leave it, and be all the more thankful for the amazing grace that God extends toward us in the saving work of Jesus Christ.
So, the writer, in a deep hole, with full knowledge of his culpability, obeys the Third Law of Holes, as should we. The Psalmist asks for help.
Having stopped the digging and having sent up a cry for help, one must then follow the Fourth Law of Holes – wait with hope. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.”
Wait with hope. Sound so easy. But it is incredibly hard to wait. But if you can’t wait, you can’t hope – for one is inextricably tied to the other. Only those who wait upon the Lord, can hope in the Lord. So how do we do that. Well, I’m glad you asked, here are a couple of suggestions:
1. We wait by staying in the “now”. Going over problems, reliving old mistakes, or getting a case of the “shoulda, woulda, coulda’s” is not very helpful. Rather, we focus on the tasks at hand, the next steps and what positive actions we can take moving ahead. In a hole, there is no way to go but up, and that is not going to happen without waiting with a clear mind and heart.
2. We also wait with confidence in the One on whom we have called for help. We put in a call to God – we must let God answer. We reached out to the Creator of the Universe. We have to let God be God and do what God does – on God’s schedule, not ours.
3. We wait with courage. This is the advice of the Psalmist: “Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.” John Wayne reportedly said that “courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”(7) Or, perhaps a climbing metaphor would also work: “Courage is being scared to death, but strapping on a harness, snapping in a carabiner and having faith that the rope won’t break.”
4. And finally, we wait with contentment. We do not wait as though we’re standing in front of an elevator door, punching the “UP” button again and again as if it will make the elevator arrive faster. The elevator will come when it comes. We learn to practice peace; we learn to be content with God’s timing. As Paul wrote to the Romans, “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Corrie ten Boom once wrote: “There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.”(8) When God’s forgiving love reaches down to the depths of our soul, it lifts us up to a new place, a fresh start, and it is then that we realize that when we are forgiven, we indeed have a future. That is what the Psalmist wanted; it’s what we all want. We all want to be forgiven with a future.
Through Jesus Christ – that’s exactly what we have – forgiveness, with a future waiting for us.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline.com, retrieved 3/2/23.
2. Ibid…
3. Ibid…
4. Ibid…
5. Ibid…
6. Ibid…
7. Ibid…
8. Ibid…
